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Featured Content

The 2017 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, in honouring the work of Richard H. Thaler, highlights the growing impact of behavioural economics in science and policy. To mark the occasion, we have put together this collection of behavioural economics articles published this year in the journal.

Have your article accepted in principle before data collection has started by submitting a registered report. With this format, acceptance in principle happens before the research outcomes are known. As a result, publication bias is neutralized, as are incentives for practices that undermine the validity of scientific research.

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Latest Research

By analysing the language of tweets around protests in Baltimore in 2015 and through behavioural laboratory experiments, Dehghani and colleagues find that moralization of protest issues leads to greater support for violence and increased incidence of violent protest.

Aral and Dhillon specify a class of empirically motivated influence maximization models that incorporate more realistic features of real-world social networks and predict substantially greater influence propagation compared with traditional models.

High arousal enables young people to better detect salient stimuli. In older people, arousal leads to increased processing of all stimuli. This difference can be explained by age-related changes in how the locus coeruleus–noradrenaline system interacts with cortical attention networks.

A personalized letter intervention that corrected parents’ misbeliefs about their child’s absences reduced chronic absenteeism by 10% and is significantly more cost effective than alternative current best practices.

In the United States and India, people's folk conceptions of nationality are flexible, seeing it as more biological and fixed at birth or cultural and fluid, depending on the scenario. Belief in fluidity predicts positive attitudes to immigration.

News & Comment

Online communication has become integral to modern political behaviour — to the extent that events online both reflect and influence actions offline. A study uses geolocated Twitter data to argue that moralization of protests leads to violent protests and increased support for violence.

About the Journal

Nature Human Behaviour publishes research of outstanding significance into any aspect of human behaviour: its psychological, biological, and social bases, as well as its origins, development, and disorders. The journal aims to enhance the visibility of research into human behaviour, strengthening its societal reach and impact.

We publish a range of content types including original research articles, Reviews, Perspectives, Comments, News, and Features that elaborate on significant advances in the field and cover topical issues.

Nature Human Behaviour is staffed by a dedicated team of professional editors, with relevant research backgrounds. It is led by Stavroula Kousta, formerly the Editor of Trends in Cognitive Sciences and Senior Editor at PLOS Biology, and also includes John Carson, Anne-Marike Schiffer, and Mary Elizabeth Sutherland.

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Videos

Witchcraft beliefs are and have been widespread in human societies, but what impact do they have on social interactions and what cultural evolutionary function might they serve? Field experiments and network data show that the witchcraft label ‘Zhu’ influences labour-sharing and reproductive choices in a large network of southwest Chinese villages. Zhu is not an indicator of prosociality, but may function to spite or damage rivals.

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Collection

As of January 25, 2018, the NIH, the biggest funder of biomedical research in the world, is implementing policy changes which will affect the majority of US laboratories working with human subjects.
We think it is vital for all parties, external stakeholders and the public to engage in an informed, productive debate about these developments to identify issues and opportunities. In this special collection of commissioned opinion pieces, representatives of international funding agencies and science regulators, non-profit organizations and think tanks, and leading basic and clinical researchers in the US and Europe contribute novel, thought-provoking arguments. In an accompanying Q&A, Michael Lauer of the NIH addresses questions regarding the implementation and gives advice on future grant applications.